Why Cross-Sector Stakeholder Engagement Is Essential to Solving Systemic Challenges in the U.S.
By B Global X Design
Many of the most urgent challenges facing the United States today—inequity in access to services, environmental degradation, economic stagnation in disinvested communities, and public health disparities—are not isolated problems. They are deeply interconnected systems failures that cut across domains, geographies, and populations.
And yet, the responses we build remain siloed. At B Global X Design, we believe that to tackle these challenges, we need to start with how we engage the people and institutions who shape them. We need to design stakeholder engagement as a system in itself—one that builds trust, breaks down silos, and aligns diverse actors toward collective action.
We are in the early stages of building a platform to support this work. But our conviction is clear: systemic problems require systemic collaboration. And the first step toward that collaboration is an intentional, inclusive stakeholder engagement process.
Coordination among Systems Is the Problem
Whether the issue is climate resilience, youth unemployment, creative industry development, or health inequities, one theme remains consistent: the problem isn’t a lack of funding or ideas—it’s that the system isn’t designed to work together.
At a recent The Investment Integration Project (TIPP) symposium I virtually attended, David Erickson of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who described what he calls the “heat map problem.” Neighborhoods, such as the Bronx, show up on risk heat maps with overlapping challenges, such as poor air quality, limited green space, and high poverty. The more issues, the “hotter” they appear on the map. Not surprisingly, the “hottest” areas with overlapping risks also tend to experience higher rates of asthma, chronic disease, underemployment, education lapses, and other poor socioeconomic indicators. The point being these challenges don’t occur in isolation—and yet, solutions are often fragmented across agencies, sectors, and disciplines.
Other speakers continued to emphasize Erickson’s point, the failure of siloed systems to address overlapping vulnerabilities. “We build programs where the lights are already on, not where the real suffering is happening,”Erickson says.The systems meant to support communities rarely coordinate. “Health people don’t talk to environmental people, who don’t talk to economic development people,” he continued. At the national level, $2.4 trillion is spent annually to address these challenges across health, anti-poverty programs, community development, and climate initiatives. But most of it is delivered through disconnected channels. This leads to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and a failure to address root causes.
Let’s face it, an investor is not going to come in to save one unit of a firm, when several units are failing. The investor wants to look holistically at the firm to see where and how to make a viable investment.
A New Approach: Designing Stakeholder Engagement as Civic Infrastructure
What if the real innovation isn’t just in new programs, but in how we bring people together to solve problems?
At B Global x Design, we believe that stakeholder engagement must be intentionally designed as part of the solution, not as an afterthought. We know that real success comes from designing localized engagement architectures that reflect the needs, knowledge, and leadership of communities.We’re building a model for use by communities, businesses, investors, or issue-based organizations to:
Map the full stakeholder ecosystem—public, private, nonprofit, academic, creative, and community-based.
Convene cross-sector engagement processes that lead to co-created solutions.
Use systems thinking and design methods to identify leverage points and build alignment.
Prototype shared responses, whether for climate, economic development, education, or health.
The result: create a holistic strategic roadmap for a community or business or issue to create and test solutions. Create, for example, an elderly/ disabled home care cooperative model, such as those created by the ICA Group, an organization dedicated to creating employee-owned and operated businesses.
The Opportunity Ahead
B Global x Design is just getting started. But we are driven by the belief that no systemic challenge can be solved by one sector, one program, or one voice. Our goal is to help create the scaffolding for shared solutions—what Erickson called the “pipeline at the bathtub level” (narrow view) that connects to the “Milky Way” of national strategy and capital.
Whether the issue is rural broadband, urban design, public safety, or workforce development, we will create for you an engagement processes that:
Bridge institutional gaps
Fund inclusive intermediaries
Create feedback loops between local experience and policy design
Align action with values of equity, trust, and community-driven innovation
The future of systems change starts with how we work together. Let’s design the process that makes that possible.
→ Learn more or get in touch at www.bglobalxdesign.org